Printing question

[Andy Baker]

All of the reports in our VB.NET 2003 application are printed on blank A4
paper, and Crystal Reports XI is used to create all the forms, logos etc on
the report. We have a new user who wants to print reports (invoices) on to
pre-printed stationery on a dot-matrix printer. As far as I can see, I have
2 options to do this.
1) Use Crystal Reports with and adjust the size of the page header and
footer until it fits correctly on the pre-printed form.
2) Output the text only to the printer in the correct format (like I
used to with DOS applications).
Crystal Reports seems like the easier option, but am I correct in thinking
that it will print as a graphic, and therefore printing would be very slow
on the dot-matrix. The second option seems better, but I have no idea how to
go about it. What would people suggest, and does anyone have a link to an
article that shows how to print 'text-only' in VB.NET? I found a reference
to outputting raw data on the Microsoft site, but I'm not sure that this is
what I need (and it seems very complicated). There are no control codes,
just plain text. Thanks in advance.

Andy Baker

 

[Guest]

The System.Drawing.Printing namespace provides the classes you would need to
create PrintDocuments. The classes initially may seem convoluted, and they
actually are a bit. But the link to a pdf below helps make sense of it all.

The topic is "Printers and Printing"

http://www.itcourseware.com/Webpdfs/webap-advvbnet.pdf

 

[Andy Baker]

Thanks for that - it seems like exactly what I need.

Andy